The Exclusion Oscars: What This Year’s Academy Awards Left Out

When people complain about the Academy Awards, which they often do, the laments tend to be that the ceremony was too long, too cheesy, too boring—in other words, too much like the year before. Quite often, these people are right. The Oscars, out of all the winter awards ceremonies, have a reputation for self-seriousness and the sort of stagy camp that should have faded from the culture with the Nixon-era variety shows; if the Golden Globes are the Prius of the family, the Oscars are your father’s puce-hued, boat-shaped, undead Ford. Still, each ceremony acquires a style of its own. Who can forget the clammy, creepy Seth MacFarlane awards of 2013? Or the wilted, hosting-before-coffee awards of James Franco and Anne Hathaway, two years before? This year’s Oscars were something different. On the Academy’s end, it was the prickliest ceremony in recent memory—haughty and clannish, with just a hint of point-proving. The honorees themselves, though, were strong in their consensus-seeking activisms. The two moods never squared. For the first time in a long time, there was a three-way split between the ceremony the Academy seemed to want, the ceremony realized by the awardees, and the ceremony that the viewers sought from home.

Neil Patrick Harris, bronzed and—viewers later found—toned so as to look not unlike a giant Oscar statue, gave what may have been the most endearingly unfunny performance of his hosting life, powering through a list of C-grade jokes and smiling sheepishly as, like cannonballs released as ballast from the Vasa, they bombed and sank. His flaccid humor served as a distraction from the ceremony’s harder, stranger elements, of which there were a lot. What to make of the oddly charming performance of “Everything Is Awesome” by Tegan and Sara and the Lonely Island—an elaborate staging that suggested runoff from a PBS educational show? Or of Lady Gaga, exquisitely dressed in Alaïa, singing in peak voice—for reasons never really explained—a medley from The Sound of Music? When, exactly, did The Sound of Music become a high watermark of postwar cinema? (Other films of 1965: Doctor Zhivago, Help!, Olivier’s Othello.) The point was clear: The Academy’s favorite, 50 years earlier, had endured. Never mind that it was a hit stage musical before being put on film.

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The odd, late Sound of Music publicity campaign helped frame many of the Academy’s choices about what to honor and, more crucially, what not to. It gave the beloved Boyhood, otherwise the most celebrated film of the year but one made entirely outside the Hollywood infrastructure, the cold shoulder in favor of Birdman, a star-studded experimental movie that centers on the predicaments of people who used to be very famous and are now less so. It did not acknowledge Joan Rivers, the longest-performing and most industry-critical comedienne of her generation, in its yearly roundup of dead entertainers. The slights were unsubtle, and they carried a message: The Academy plays with creative people who play with the Academy. In that sense, this year’s ceremony emerged as the Exclusion Oscars, pulling up the drawbridge and celebrating the industry’s own. It was hard not to take the sleek, hard-featured, gum-gnashing face of Michael Keaton—who loomed over the ceremony as a kind of mascot, despite not winning—as an icon of the evening’s mood.

The Academy’s insularity was striking especially because it was not reflected in the people accepting awards. From the wonderfully off-the-wall, equal-pay-seeking address of Patricia Arquette (Boyhood’s only honoree) to the tear-inducing performances and issues-based speeches of Common and John Legend—from the pleas about neurodegenerative disease to the moving confessionalism of the 34-year-old screenwriter Graham Moore—this was an honorable group of honorees, interested in turning Hollywood’s attentions to problems past the preoccupations of New York City and West Los Angeles. One of the sweetest moments of the night was when Alejandro González Iñárritu, rising to accept his best-director award, gave a long, deep hug to Richard Linklater, his leading competitor.

Over the hours after the ceremony, social media seemed to echo with disappointment: Boyhood, especially, touched many people very deeply, and, following the ceremony, it was copiously compared to Citizen Kane, Taxi Driver, and other movies that the Academy overlooked. If there was a message in yesterday’s winners, it was that the Oscars are largely about burnishing the Hollywood brand; if its losers proved anything it was that it’s possible to make good, popular films without the industry’s support. And so, alas, old resentments endure. Building, rather than delimiting, community was the theme of the night’s speeches, and it’s a message that one wishes the Academy had heard more clearly. Maybe next year.